Terminal Impact

by Charles Henderson

  Scratched out of this cruel earth west of the Euphrates, all the way to Syria, over the centuries, little outposts had emerged at spots in the desert where sporadic and random deep wellsprings tapped into underground water and sustained life in this otherwise-lifeless place. For generations, dirt-poor families survived on these dirty plots, caretaking the precious water sources. Caravans going to and from Babylon to Damascus and the seaports of Beirut and Tyre or up to Homs and Aleppo, over thousands of years, camped at these waypoints, where a caretaker and his family provided refreshment and rest to weary travelers.

  With the war, many of these families abandoned their poor existence, leaving their ancestral lands and precious water to belligerent strangers. Because of their far-flung obscurity, the outposts gave Abu Omar Bakr al-Nasser and his Jamaat Ansar al-Sunnah fighters excellent refuge in the midst of their surrounding American and Iraqi enemy forces. They lived much like the Apache and Comanche war bands did 150 years ago, fighting Texas Rangers, pioneer militias, and United States Cavalry in the American West.

  The old graybeard Abu Omar had set up a number of garrison outposts in these deserted farms. In them he bunkered caches of arms and ammunition, far off the beaten path, and quartered in them his eclectic army of migrant jihadists who drifted here from all parts of the world.

  Typically, these old places had large and often complex underground storage chambers and living quarters, dug and tunneled over the centuries. What might look aboveground like just a simple, stone-and-adobe enclave with a few meager animal shelters could in truth have a great area of underground facilities. They provided Abu Omar’s fighters a place of temperate comfort even in the harshest winters and most broiling summers.

  Such was the outpost where Abu Omar and Zarqawi had dined a few nights ago, entertaining their war chiefs, and where Giti Sadiq and her Christian sisters, Amira and Miriam, and the Shia Muslim girl kidnapped in Syria, Sabeen, now labored in their slavery. Ironically, Jack Valentine and his crew had put themselves in a good position to see the various traffic routes going to and from this particular hole-in-the-wall enemy garrison.

  Because she was Christian, Omar’s henchmen had not bothered to bury the body of the young formerly virgin girl, Lina, after Zarqawi had raped and murdered her. They just tossed her corpse in a ditch a hundred yards downwind from the house and barns, where they also dumped other rotting garbage. Now the scavenging rooks and ravens and jackals picked the flesh off her sad bones.

  Two miles south of this house and the ditch where the dead girl, Lina, lay rotting, Gunny Valentine and Sergeant Quinlan made their hide. It sat at the far western end of the MARSOC team’s two-mile picket of four hides. If the wind blew just right, Jack and Cochise could catch a faint whiff of the scent of Lina’s decaying body. Yet in Iraq, the stench of death lay just about everywhere. To not smell death would get a man’s attention.

  Bronco Starr and Jaws held a spot five hundred yards down the line, east, from the gunny and Cochise. After a wide gap, in the next hide, Sergeant Sammy LaSage ran the primary sniper gun and Corporal Petey Preston took his turn spotting. Cotton Martin held command at the other end of their line, with Chico Powell taking first turn on their bolt rifle while the staff sergeant manned the team’s Vigilance .338 Lapua Magnum semiautomatic support rifle.

  Both Cotton and Jack had set up their light machine guns at arm’s reach, should the enemy discover their positions and make a run at them. They planned to defend and hold ground, calling in the artillery and the reaction force. However, if the Hajis came at them in large numbers, they would bug out, call artillery on their abandoned positions, and run like hell.

  “It’s a plan full of holes and what-ifs,” Jack had admitted to Black Bart Roberts, who had reluctantly approved the idea. Gunny Valentine had assured him that the worst-case scenario could never happen. He and his Marine Scout-Snipers were just too good to get caught.

  The reward, on the other hand, he had told Roberts, was worth the risk. The crisscrossing patchwork of camel trails and the caravan hideaways scattered across the vast badlands could offer his team a target-rich environment, and maybe a high-value kill, the gunny had speculated.

  “If I’m the bad guys, this is where I’m disappearing,” Jack pitched. “They know we don’t have manpower to roll over every rock. And drones and planes don’t see everything. Me and my boys can. We’ll be fine, sir. Trust me.”

  _ 10 _

  At dawn, Jack took his first shot. A Haji on a Honda.

  All night, the sniper teams had heard the sounds of car engines and truck engines and a lot of motorcycle engines. Vehicles moving far to the west of them, going north, then turning east, just beyond the horizon. The dead man with the rifle, riding the motorcycle, represented the net result of all their efforts.

  Gunny Valentine had anticipated that with the busy crosshatch of camel trails, roads, and cross-country tracks across their killing zone, the night would have proven much busier. Prime real estate, he thought, given the busy road a mile to their south called T1, a straight shot out of Haqlaniyah westward to the south side of the town of al-Qa’im on the Syrian border, and the even busier MSR Bronze, Iraqi Highway 12, that ran several miles to their east and turned north, running along the Euphrates, also to Qa’im and Syria, entering the town on its north side.

  When the Haji on the Honda broke over the horizon, he had blazed across the desert full-out, racing straight across their frontage, a thousand yards out, like a duck in a shooting gallery.

  “Nice,” Cochise Quinlan said, as Valentine’s shot with the .338 Lapua Magnum chambered M40A3 bolt rifle lifted the man off the bike and put him in a series of cartwheels while the motorcycle tumbled end over end like a tin can.

  All eight of the snipers had an angle on the man, but the gunny shot first, since the gunman crossed Jack’s lane first.

  “How do you feel about that shot?” Cotton Martin asked on the intercom.

  “Something ain’t right, you know?” Jack said.

  “Roger that,” Martin answered. “Like he’s bait.”

  “Want we should slide out there and check him out?” Bronco asked, wanting to help.

  “No,” Jack said. “Let him lie. Everyone stay quiet and put your heads on swivels. If this guy is some kind of bait, they’ll jiggle the fishing line.”

  —

  Juba and Hasan lay hidden among rocks on a small rise in the desert, and watched the young volunteer ride the motorcycle as fast as he could make it travel across the empty landscape, racing it eastward. They waited as the rider shrank smaller and smaller, until they could only see the plume of dust behind his bike.

  Then came the echoing report of the heavy rifle, a throaty boom that rolled across the desert, telling anyone with the understanding of such things that a sniper had just made a kill. The dust stopped, and they waited, now looking through their American military field glasses, trying to spot movement.

  No one had told the young lad that he was bait. An attempt to draw out the snipers, or at least approximate their location. Abu Omar had given the kid from Amman, Jordan, who had ridden his Honda motorcycle overnight to join the jihad of Jamaat Ansar al-Sunnah with so many other enthused young men of late, a canvas dispatch case filled with meaningless papers. He told him to ride as fast as he could to Haqlaniyah, and to cut across country, away from the roads, so that the advancing Americans would not see him.

  With a worn-out Russian AK rifle strapped across his back, and one magazine with six rounds of ammunition, Omar sent the boy flying.

  “A very important dispatch to our brothers in the south,” the old graybeard had told the boy, giving him the traditional hug and kiss on both cheeks. Then cried out as the boy rode away, “Allahu Akbar, God is great!”

  The boy raised his fist high in resolve as he drove away, his rear tire chewing through the dirt, sending a brown plume skyward.

  First he rode south a
mile, then turned eastward and twisted the throttle full open, his AK rifle riding sideways across his back and the canvas pouch tied against his chest.

  Juba and Hasan watched him make his turn toward the east and waited, watching to locate exactly where along the ridge above the shallow wadi the American snipers hid. The two jihadi snipers had all but given up when Jack finally took the one shot and killed the boy.

  “Much farther to the east than we had estimated from their operation plan,” Dzhamal Umarov told Khasan Shishani, watching through the field glasses and seeing nothing.

  “What shall we do now?” Hasan responded, speaking in their native Chechen dialect of the Nakho-Dagestanian tongue of their Caucasian homeland.

  Speaking in their language of birth made both men feel free. Around the Iraqis, as Juba and Hasan, they had to use a pigeon mix of French and Arabic. In Baghdad, as business partners from Avignon, Davet Taché and Jean René Decoux had to speak English with graceful southern French accents.

  “The body and the wrecked motorcycle gives us an approximation,” Dzhamal explained, pondering the situation. As a skilled sniper, he knew that the Marines would not needlessly expose themselves to kick around and check the pockets of a dead victim. They would wait and see who comes looking for the rider.

  He scanned the horizon from his left to his right and pondered some more. Then he looked again at the small rise of the land that followed the dry streambed that extended to the east.

  “Do you see, Khasan,” Umarov said, pointing at the subtle rise in the landscape. “That little ridge follows the wadi miles and miles to the river. That is where our Marines wait to see who comes to collect the dead.”

  “May we now go home to Baghdad?” Shishani asked, hopeful. “We are days late on our return.”

  Dzhamal smiled at his partner, who had stood with him through thick and thin, through the demise of the Soviet Union, who as a very young man had helped him build a successful business in France.

  “We can do no one further good here, and certainly not if we are killed in a senseless battle, wasting a thousand good lives just to rave at our enemy,” he said, still smiling. “Yes, it is time we return to Baghdad, or at least back to the Tigris, where people expect to see us.”

  “When?” Khasan Shishani asked, hopeful.

  “We will make our report and go at once,” Umarov said. “When Abu Omar and his army stir the bees, their stings will follow with severity. We do not want to be here when the bees swarm. While they fight, and provide a diversion, we will go north with Brother Zarqawi and cross back to Baiji while the enemy busies himself here.”

  —

  “Dude, it’s been two hours,” Bronco Starr complained on his MICH helmet’s hands-free headset.

  “Patience,” Jack answered.

  “If anyone was coming, they’d have come by now, boss,” Cochise piled on. “Seriously. Sometimes you draw a fold hand. No shame in it. We can pack up, move on, draw new cards. What you say?”

  “You rolled the dice, Jack. Sometimes you get snake eyes,” Cotton agreed. “Not much shaking in these weeds. Maybe we should swing back toward the highway and the river, where more people live. Closer to the operation, maybe they’ll stir some business.”

  “We stick it out, according to the op plan, until nightfall,” Jack said. “You heard that traffic running all night until daylight. If we move, I think we need to go in the direction of all that activity.”

  “True,” Cotton said. “Nobody heading to see grandma at four in the morning. So let’s move west when it gets dark.”

  “That’s a plan,” the gunny said.

  “Fuck,” Bronco let out with a big breath. “I’m cooked in my own juice. And I need to take a shit. Do you mind?”

  “Drop down in the wadi and let fly,” Jaws said. “Ain’t shit happening but your shit.”

  “This really sucks, you know?” Bronco added while he slid to the rear and got in the wash, where he could squat.

  “Suffer patiently and patiently suffer,” Sage said, reminding Bronco of one of their sniper-school ethos.

  Bronco moaned, and Jaws laughed.

  “Sage,” the corporal came back, “that’s right up there with one shot,one kill, and the deadliest thing on the battlefield is one well-aimed shot. Give me a break with the Hathcock bumper sticker bullshit. I need to concentrate on cutting this turd.”

  “Suffer quietly and quietly suffer, Bronco,” Jack said.

  —

  Walter Gillespie had taken an admin run to Baghdad for Speedy Espinoza, departing on the return flight of the same Osprey that had brought out Chris Gray. The two intelligence field officers had set up shop with the First Battalion, Fifth Marines S2 section, working in concert with them on Operation Quick Strike Vengeance.

  Hacksaw, Kermit Alexander, and Cory Webster had proven themselves valuable and trustworthy to Espinoza in the few days it took to unload the CIA boxes and plug in their computers. They acted like Marines, old Corps Marines. He quickly came to like them.

  When Gillespie got to his apartment, a pile of mail and dirty magazines lay on the floor outside his door. He pushed it with his boot toe, then bent over and picked it up.

  Before he put the key in his lock, he looked up at the inside top edge of the doorjamb, where he had pressed a little piece of Scotch Magic mending tape. It had broken.

  Then he lay flat on the hallway and looked through the narrow space under his door, and used one of the pieces of mail to feel for any sort of wire or triggering device. Nothing else out of place, he slipped his key in the lock and gently turned it, standing at the side of the door.

  With his back to the wall, next to the entry, he turned the knob and gave a push.

  “No bombs,” he said to himself as he went inside, clutching the stack of mail in his hand. He looked at the side table next to the door. Nothing out of place there, so he set down the letters and magazines.

  For several minutes, he stood at the entrance and studied every inch of his apartment. Nothing moved. Nothing visibly taken.

  “Why would anybody come in here except to steal my shit?” he asked himself.

  Still he didn’t move. Old habits kicked in. He studied everything more carefully, and thought.

  In bad places, Hacksaw knew survival depended on paying attention to the little things, like the tiny piece of tape he had stuck on the top of the door and doorjamb where no one would notice it, but it would tell him if someone had been inside. No one just opens a door when you’re not home without doing something, usually bad.

  “What the fuck were they after?” he asked himself, and pulled out his cell phone. He dialed Cory Webster’s number.

  “Webster,” the voice answered.

  “Habu,” Hacksaw said. “You see those two CIA boys?”

  “Yeah. Why?” he said.

  “Ask them both if they had any reasons to have someone snoop my apartment,” Gillespie said. “And before you ask, study their faces. When you ask, watch how they react and tell me.”

  “Roger,” Habu said. Then turned to the two agents. “Yo, Chris. Speedy.”

  Both men gave Webster blank looks.

  “What?” Gray said, as Hacksaw listened to them.

  “Would you have any reason to have people snooping in Walter’s apartment?” Webster asked, watching their reactions.

  Both men raised their eyebrows, showing expressions of genuine surprise. Then frowns appeared.

  “What’s going on?” Chris Gray asked, stepping close to Habu. “That Hacksaw on the horn?”

  “Yeah,” Webster said.

  Gray took the phone.

  “Walter, what’s up?” he asked.

  “I’m standing inside my door,” he said. “Someone opened up my apartment, obviously to come inside, but I can’t figure out why. Nothing missing. Nothing out of place.”

&
nbsp; “Maintenance maybe?” Gray suggested.

  “They leave a note on the door, and I always know beforehand,” Hacksaw said. “If it wasn’t you guys, checking out my shit, which wouldn’t piss me off at all, you’re welcome anytime, then it was some ass-wipe up to no good.”

  “If they didn’t take anything, then what?” Gray said. And thought a moment. “How about leaving something?”

  “I’ll check around,” Hacksaw said.

  “Let me know,” Gray said, and clicked off the phone.

  Walter Gillespie walked to the refrigerator and got a beer. Then he went to his silverware drawer and got the bottle opener. As he looked down at the array of knives, forks, spoons, and other utensils, a small black object in the back of the drawer, jammed behind the knife, fork, spoon, and other crap organizer, caught his eye.

  “What the fuck’s that?” he said, gulping a swallow of Amstel and taking hold of the thing. When he got it out, he recognized what it was. “A thumb drive? Why would anyone put a thumb drive in my silverware drawer?”

  He set down the beer bottle and pulled out the silverware divider. Beneath it he found a copy of one-five’s top secret operation plan. The one that Cesare Alosi had secretly made.

  “Who the fuck?” Gillespie said, and it didn’t take long for him to line up his prime candidates for the villainy. “Alosi and Blevins, those motherfuckers.”

  “What the fuck do I do?” he then asked himself as he considered the possibilities, and the impossibility of him explaining his innocence.

  Just then, his phone rang. Chris Gray.

  “Anything?” the CIA agent asked as soon as Hacksaw pushed the green button.

  “A little misplaced humor by my boss and his scumbag,” Gillespie answered.